Susan Elan Jones
Main Page: Susan Elan Jones (Labour - Clwyd South)Fuel Poverty (Wales)
Susan Elan Jones Excerpts(11 years, 9 months ago)
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Chris Ruane
I have given way to the hon. Gentleman once; that is all he is getting from me.
The Government have introduced the energy company obligation, for which I give them credit, and £1.2 billion has been set aside for the whole of the UK—[Interruption.] I urge the Minister—he is yakking away over there—to ensure that Wales gets its fair share of that ECO money.
Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)
I wonder whether the hon. Member for Brecon and Radnorshire (Roger Williams) was going to point out that the 5% VAT rate for energy came about due to a successful Labour rebellion in the dying days of John Major’s Government. There may be a good analogy there for us in what will hopefully be the dying days of the current Government.
Susan Elan Jones
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his noise.
Does my hon. Friend agree that this matter is one of the most moral issues because it disproportionately affects people on low incomes and pensioners? That is a really important issue right across Wales.
Chris Ruane
Those affected are the most vulnerable and elderly pensioners, and, specifically in Wales, they are also those who are off grid but cannot get connected to gas because of topography, geology or geography. Dyserth is an off-grid town in my constituency. I was successful in getting gas connected to Bodelwyddan, because it was low-lying, but unsuccessful with Dyserth.
As the hon. Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr (Jonathan Edwards) said, Wales is a net exporter of energy. North Wales, in particular, is playing its role in renewable energies, and my constituency will have the biggest array of offshore wind farms in the world. I switched on 30 turbines at North Hoyle some eight years ago, and when he was Secretary of State for Wales, my right hon. Friend the Member for Neath (Mr Hain) switched on another 30 turbines at Rhyl Flats. Behind those, we will have 200 turbines at Gwynt y Môr and the 2,000 wind turbines at the Rhiannon wind farm array. When I was switching on the North Hoyle turbines, the Prime Minister was describing them as “giant bird blenders”, at the same time as sticking a mini turbine on his own roof in Notting Hill. He was looking both ways.
North Wales has in Wrexham the Sharp solar panel factory, which is the biggest producer of solar panels in western Europe. Sharp made its future plans when Labour introduced the feed-in tariff. It cranked up production and got all the workers in place only for the current Government to say that they were going to scrap the tariff. We and companies such as Sharp need certainty.